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Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac

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Dave Amram passionately evokes in his newest book the rhythms and poetic vibes of his life all the while casting to the four winds the much misaligned "beatnik myth" that plagued Jack Kerouac's life and stigmatized his art. Through Amram's sound recollections, Kerouac's legacy as an artist resounds with the exclusive atmosphere that is also conducive, even to this day, to the heart and soul of Amram's classical compositions and world-wide performances. It is a testament written from a contemporary of Kerouac's that celebrates the efforts of those fascinating artists of the post-WWII years consisting of Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank, Philip Lamantia and Dody Muller (as well as a host of others). We are there at the first jazz/poetry reading in NYC in 1956, the filming of Pull My Daisy in 1959, the last years of Jack Kerouac's life in the late 1960s until the posthumous aftermath that gradually began to realize the literary merit of Kerouac's art that today firmly places him within the canon of American Literature along side Hemingway, Poe, Melville and Twain. Kerouac is not so much eulogized in this memoir as he is painted humanly as the soulful cat he was celebrating life the best way he knew how, in his books. Despite telling Amram in July 1968 that "fame is a drag to anybody who wants new work done", Kerouac intuitively sensed the longevity of his life's work would outlast his own years dogged by the fame he no longer wanted. The same can be said for David Amram whose own art is vital to the understanding and appreciation of post-WWII American culture in symphonic, jazz, global and folk music. Pick up this book today for a breath of fresh Kerouacian air . . . .

For a substantial number of non-aficionados, David Amram's name is familiar today only from a line in a Rafi song for small children. But Amram has an impressive resume that includes entries as a classical composer of concert and film music (his score for The Manchurian Candidate has been justly praised) and as a bop French hornist who played with Mingus, Gillespie,Taylor and many others. I have long admired Amram's touching and understated violin sonata, of which there is, lamentably, no recording available at present. Amram was also a good buddy and frequent collaborator of Jack Kerouac's, and his new memoir "Offbeat" is a good natured-if highly repetitive and self-congratulatory-record of a number of Thunderbird wine-soaked experiences among "the beats."

My placement within scare quotes of the common term for beret-covered, bongo-carrying, scat-singing, goatee-wearing bohemians is highly advised, since Amram repeatedly insists that there never were any such animals. In fact, it is perhaps the main tenet of this book that Kerouac was a writer, pure and simple, and that the only part of the beat mythology with any grain of truth is that Kerouac and his friends Allen Ginsburg, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and David Amram, were precursors of flower children in being particularly gentle and constitutionally opposed to formality or exclusivity. In all other respects, at least according to Amram, Kerouac was just a slightly tipsy version of Melville or Emerson who is finally receiving from critics and academia his long-denied coronation as a towering genius of American Literature.

Offbeat contains a number of incongruities that are common to this type of work. Each of the dozen ingredients of a certain (now 50-year-old) omelet is recounted with precision, and entire conversations and minor details of late night jazz-poetry events from the 50's are set forth in detail, but where, when or exactly how Amram became Kerouac's collaborator/muse never comes to light.

In addition, there seems an almost painful desperation for Mr. Amram to get his "creds" into public view. Apparently sensing that he could tell us only so many times (three, I believe) that his prior book, Vibrations, contains 465 pages, and that he has written over 100 orchestral works, he frequently puts this sort of information in the mouths of others. At one point, poet Frank O'Hara, who is trying to ease Amram's disappointment at failing to get a Kerouac/Amram improv gig at the Museum of Modern Art in 1957, provides the following consoling remarks:

"Do it downtown where you're already loved. It was a mistake for me to try to break down the wall s of pretension here at the Museum. When you get better known, they'll fawn and grovel over you...at least until you fall out of fashion. Do it downtown. Let's try the Brata Art Gallery on East 10th Street. You've already played for their art openings, David. [so maybe I don't really need to tell you the address?] The artists all remember you from your stint this past winter at the Five Spot with your quartet. They know your scores for the Free Shakespeare in the Park you just started composing [because they're precognitive when it comes to their adoration of your work?], and they've heard you with Mingus."

This kind of thing is repeated endlessly throughout Offbeat-both in the pages of reminiscinces of his performances and conversations with Kerouac and in the later sections, which deal mostly with events undertaken in the writer's honor. An unwelcome pathos accompanies Amram's successive pleas that the reader engage in something akin to this mantra: "They were smart! They were serious about our art and could discuss it intelligently! They weren't anything like Maynard G. Krebs!" Everyone's wife is beautiful and gracious, everyone's daughter is devoted. Worst of all, each new Amram composition or improv and every Kerouac scat (we are given no transcriptions of these, unfortunately) is said to be a masterpiece of its type. Every performance is hailed as phenomenal, extraordinary, life altering. This aspect is exaggerated by over-the-top cover blurbs from Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carolyn Cassady, and Frank McCourt-three individuals who are heaped with garlands within the pages of Offbeat.

In spite of all these shortcomings, however, it's hard not to like both Amram and his portrayal of the "beat" scene. Amram is obviously a sweetheart whose hyperbole can be traced in equal parts to a child-like sincerity and to his devotion to a talented friend who was lost to him in tragic fashion. Several recollections in the book are great fun, especially Amram's recounting of the cuckoo creation of the silent film Pull My Daisy, which consisted largely of the trashing of a New York City apartment to the accompaniment of Amram's music and Kerouac's improvised narration. Allen Ginsburg is affectionately portrayed as a bit of a left-wing scold, and Gregory Corso comes off as a horny, wisecracking commentator on contemporary mores, something like a poetic precursor to Seinfeld. Amram paints Kerouac as diffident about everything except his talents. When filmmaker Alfred Leslie asks him how he can be sure that his first improvisatory narration to Pull My Daisy can't be improved upon, the novelist answers, "Because I'm touched by the hand of God." Amram makes a credible case for their joint spontaneous creation of "poetry-and-music" sessions in the mid-50's being the basis not only of rap and hip hop music but of spoken word events and poetry slams.

Now in his seventies, Amram remains a tireless performer, composer and storyteller, but without more recordings of his work, his light could fade. Even so, it will never go completely out. There's just too much talent, love and chutzpah in both the composer of In Our Land and the author of On the Road for either man to cease to inspire those who will take the time to listen, who will look closely for the diamonds lying deep within the sidewalks of Old Manhattoes.

The book title is concise. Accurate. David Amram composes and conducts an upbeat validation of the raw and beautiful Jack Kerouac and was there as a friend when Jack died in his literal and literary arms. Amram is a true friend to art and on of the few men I can personally call a role model for modern times. Amram's first book, out of print, but readily available, is titled Vibrations. Vibrations is a symphony of the first 50 years of David's collaborative life. David cleaned up his eating act and has lived to tell the amazing stories of those who died soooo young from internal and external abuse. Blow, Davey blow your horn.

thomasjohnmiller
(February 22, 2007, comment written in Bellingham, Washington)

This book has been sorely needed for a long time. David Amram, composer, conductor and player of a vast array of insturments and musical styles is literally one of the hardest working people in the music business. Somehow, he found the time to write an incredibly detailed account of what creative life was like in New York in the 1950s and 60s. Not only does he recount specific events, such as the making of the film "Pull My Daisy" and the first-ever jazz-poetry collaboration in New York, he has also recalled conversations that took place while those events were going on. He also gives us enthusiastic accounts of the many events inspired by Jack Kerouac and his work since the writer's death in 1969; events that show the wide-ranging influence Kerouac has had on contemporary culture. Just as important, Amram has also successfully dispelled what he calls the "Beatnik Myth" that for years portrayed Kerouac and cohorts as something completely different than what they were. (The story Amram relays about the day Jack died, in which reporters badgered him and others with inane questions about the "King of the Beats" illustrates the tragic way Kerouac was thought of and treated.)

Many of the great musical and literary personalities of the mid-20th Century are mentioned and quoted in this work, ranging from Leonard Bernstein, to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk all the way to the composer Edgar Varese and conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, Amram's mentor and Bernstein's predecessor as conductor of the New York Philharmonic. They all add a great deal of color to the narrative, which can be as exhilarating a read as Kerouac's fantastic trip across America in "On the Road".

Not only is Amram one of the hardest working people in the music biz, he's also one of the nicest and most gracious. It was a great pleasure and honor to have met him during a concert and at a reading of OFFBEAT this past spring. For anyone even mildly interested in Kerouac and his contemporaries, this is THE book to read, written by someone who was there. And after reading it, you may be MORE than mildly interested in Jack Kerouac, a man who truly was an original.

David Amram is truly "a gentleman and a scholar." The expression was made for him! ... I have met Mr. Amram twice in my life so far, and on both occasions - before he even knew who I was, or who I was related to - he treated me with the utmost of dignity and respect. The man has class! Not only does he have class, but he has an abundance of energy and inspiration. For an individual getting close to the age of eighty, I can personally vouch for the fact that he is more inspired and has more energy than many people even half his age. David Amram, I believe, was also "touched by the hand of God" - a statement once made by Jack Kerouac about himself. He has a huge "neshuma" (Yiddish for "soul"). The man practically, singlehandedly, created the whole genre of spoken word / jazz improvisation as well as being a pioneer of the whole "world beat" movement of cross-pollinating different musical traditions from various cultures on the planet to blend together and mold into a new hybrid of musical modalities of sound mixed together from cultural traditions that would have never rubbed shoulders together naturally without a little help from people like him. He is a truly cosmopolitan composer and a real cosmic character with a compassionate approach to interacting with his fellow man.

This book, OFFBEAT, that Mr. Amram has written about all of his time spent together over many years with the famous, modern author, Jack Kerouac, is a real gem. Not only did he know and collaborate with Jack Kerouac, he was his true friend - and he loved him like a brother. This is quite clear from everything that is written in this book as well as from everything that David has done over the years since the death of Mr. Kerouac to help further the appreciation and true understanding of the great body of literature left behind for the whole world to read that came forth from the fountainhead of that beautiful little boy in the overalls from Lowell, Massachusetts who had a dream about becoming a great writer one day. Indeed, he did - and Mr. Amram, his truly good friend and sincere appreciator of his life and his work, has blessed us all by pouring out his heart and soul into this labor-of-love of a book of all of his memories and stories of Jack.

Mr. Amram is not only an accomplished composer and conductor of classical music in the great tradition of musical composition that goes all the way back in time before Homer and the lyric poets and extends up through time through Early Music, Romantic Music, and modern Symphonic Music, but he is also a tried and true jazz musician of the first order. It's one thing to be able to read and write music on a staff. It's another thing altogether to be put to the test in trials-by-fire on the spot of the hot seat of the jam session on stage before a live audience and be able to hold your own as well as inspire others to create free-form, improvisational and experimental, instrumental music that pushes the boundaries of musical expression out into new horizons of sonic adventure. People who can do this, alone, are rare. That he can do both of these things, and do it with style and pizzazz, is utterly exceptional. The true Scorpio that he is, he is able to reach the highest heights of creative expression attainable by human beings who work their magic though the arts. This book, too, is one of those high points of expression and works of magic!

The book reads like a biography - but a biography of two men together, not one. It is not an autobiography, though you could certainly see it in that light. Neither is it an official biography of someone else, though it could certainly pass for that at a stretch. Indeed, the book itself reflects the dynamic relationship between these two artists and friends who came together as collaborators of a new genre in modern expression: a union of spoken word poetry and free-form prose combined with jazz improvisation and world-beat modalism. How beautiful! ... I cannot say enough good things about this book. It will captivate you. Once you start to read it, you will feel like you are right there in New York City in the 1950's with David, Jack, and all of their other mutual and creative friends who were also trying to push the boundaries of art, literature, and music - and have a damn good time in the process. The book is a work of art in and of itself.

I have read a lot of books about Jack Kerouac over the years. I have also read many (though not all) of Jack's books. Jack preceded Frank Zappa in his quest of transforming his daily working life into one, unified field of art. "It's all one album," Zappa used to say. He called it "conceptual continuity," and "the project object." Jack referred to it as the "the Duluoz legend" - the name he referred to himself in his books which were basically primary research reports from the field transformed into stream of consciousness works of literary "fiction." He turned his life into art. He found the philosopher's stone! He found the secret of how to "dig for gold in one's own back yard," and transform anything you find - from the "diamonds in the sidewalk" to the junk along the railroad tracks - into golden words of mind-blowing , literary masterpieces of human expression. My uncle, "Billy" Koumantzelis, who was one of Jack's closest friends in Lowell before he died, always says that Jack was not only a genius with an amazing memory but also a hard worker and a serious writer. Just recently, Uncle Billy told me that Jack used to always be writing things down in his notebook that he carried around with him constantly. He took the art of writing seriously, like any real author should. ... Mr. Amram, too, has done the same here in this book he has written about the experiences he was blessed to share with his good buddy, Jack.

Of the too-numerous-to-quote, exceptional excerpts from the book, this one here from page 97 is truly profound and hard to pass by without sharing it with the world: "... "What a bunch of crap," said Jack. "All those crooked right wing politicians on TV, waving the flag, as if they cared about America. All they care about is lining their pockets with graft and payoffs. And all the Hollywood weekend Communists in their chauffeured limousines thinking that they're representing all the poor and suffering people of the world. They deserve each other, the right wing fanatics and the self-righteous weekend revolutionaries. None of them care about anything but themselves. Jesus walked among the poor and gave tender love and mercy. All those political fanatics should be forced to read Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth and then do penance and be forced to put their principles into practice." ... "Well Jack, you have to respect Marlon's feelings about the blacklist in Hollywood and those hearings that ruined so many lives. Senator Joe McCarthy was a national disgrace and an enemy of freedom." I said. ... "I know he was," said Jack. "And so was Joseph Stalin. All politicians make me sick." ... "I'll drink to that," said Dody. ... "Me too," I said. ... "Here's to unconditional love and the teachings of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Lao Tse, Moses, Sitting Bull, and all forgotten heroes," said Jack. ..." ... Spoken like a true man of the people!

Also, I found these words of Mr. Amram's from pages 251 and 252 to sum it up pretty well about what Jack Kerouac was really all about and what he will always mean to the world: "Jack was that messenger. Jack was our reporter. He escaped to tell us. By his works he now was known. His brakeman's shining lantern from his railroading days was still shedding light on a whole era, and shedding light on all of us as well. We were now in many ways the beneficiaries of his triumph over the neglect, misinterpretation, and pain that he endured. He was being set free at last, pardoned from a life sentence in the penitentiary of the Beat Generation. He was now viewed as Jack Kerouac, prolific author of over twenty published books you would like to share with all your friends. A long time ago, he had set up a mirror for America to see itself, and that reflection was now being seen for all of its true beauty. The light that he shed, and the reflection he cast, was helping the whole world to see those diamonds in the sidewalk that were the precious stones of our everyday life. Through his vision, we could see and take part in the beauty that surrounded us. ... Like Walt Whitman's immortal lines in Leaves of Grass: "Take my leaves America ...," Jack had shared and spread his message. By a lifetime of documenting his own journey and spiritual quest, he had raised the spirits of people from every walk of life. Anyone reading his books felt that they were now able to pursue their own secret dreams in some way. He made his readers feel that they were all on their own road and that creating from your own experiences would always have a special meaning."

God bless you, David Amram, for being Jack's friend, for creating original works of human expression with him, for being true to his spirit, for helping the rest of the world understand what Jack Kerouac was really all about, and for carrying that Promethean torch that you both shared high up in the air yourself for the rest of us to see - a torch that will light our way through the darkness of the maya-illussions of this world, enabling us all to see the true value of life and what it means to be a real human being. I, for one, appreciate all you have done in the name of keeping that torch flame alive - and on my personal honor, I give you my word that I will see to it that it stays lit and shines brightly for all the world to see! ... YOWZA! - George Koumantzelis / The Aeolian Kid